Inborn in Man is Beast
by ZephyrLemon
Summary: A glimpse of Logan before he became Wolverine - before he did that to himself - and how he reacted. He was not a victim in any sense of the word. (Not canon)


A/N: Spawned from the heart-wrenching scene in X2 after Wolverine escapes from his experiment combined with his later conversation with Stryker.  
  
Inborn in Man is Beast  
  
His eyes darted wildly, blinded by primal fear. Dilated pupils left too much light unfiltered. His bare, ravaged flesh glistened with his own blood. And every time he moved his hands and the light shimmered off of the 12-inch blades he wanted to draw even more blood. Every fiber of his body tried to reject the foreign substance that lined every bone. It refused to accept the inhuman weapons that had been forced upon it. This sensation that permeated his entire body registered in his brain as pain. Pure, uninterrupted pain so intense it hummed. With every movement it rang at an even higher pitch than he'd ever imagined possible.  
  
He staggered through the dank tunnel, scorning his hideous implants at every step. With animal instincts triggering his flight mechanism, he couldn't seem to get where he was going fast enough, though he had no idea to where that was. After what seemed like miles, but was only a few hundred meters, he collapsed against a thick wooden door. It slowly fell open under his weight, pushing away several inches of packed snow in its path. Already at their limit, his senses went into overdrive as he half walked, half fell into the blinding bright sun reflected unflinchingly off the smooth landscape of snow. The bitter wind bit his naked skin, but that pain was not so much as his nervous system railing against its metal cage. Leaving a crimson trail behind in his uneven footsteps, he stumbled on. His willpower was no longer under his control. A blind, bestial force drove him somewhere - anywhere - away from the people who had done this to him.  
  
If anyone or anything else was around him, he didn't see - couldn't see anything beyond the red of his own eyes. He found the soldier's empty jeep because he walked directly into it. Immediately fearful of the obstacle, he lashed out and left huge gashes in the dusty green aluminum doors. Realizing what he had done, he reeled back so quickly he almost fell. He looked around him for the first time and saw no one, but the massive concrete building of Alkali Lake still loomed too close for his instinctual comfort. His shifting gaze caught the heap of cloth in the backseat of the jeep so he smashed his beclawed fist into the glass, grabbed the bundle and continued his faltering escape.  
  
At last, out of a faint sense of comfort but mostly pure exhaustion, he sank to the ground in the shelter of a grove of thick pines. There, the snow had been unable to collect and he could afford some meager warmth. The bundle of cloth had been a set of tan army fatigues. He carefully put on the clothes and tried not to feel treacherous wearing them. The sky grew dark and many hours passed and still he sat slumped weakly against the tree trunk and awkwardly flicked his wrists in warning at every sound he heard and movement his roving eyes caught. His senses were starting to become dull to the ubiquitous pain, but the abating made him more aware of the fatigue in his hands and arms. It was a huge toll on his hands now to lift the added weight of the blades and his arm muscles were spasming from their effort to keep the claws extended. Despite this weariness, he was too disgusted and frightened to consciously draw in the blades and therefore insert more metal under his skin. So he did not relax his arm muscles even as his eyes closed and he unwittingly fell asleep.  
  
His dreams were a combination of things both real and imagined. The more pleasant, but quickly forgotten, not-so-distant past mingled with the horrific, recent events that would disturb him for years to come.  
  
"Look at them, pathetically scrambling for every crumb of food whether it touched the fucking ground or not." He sneered disdainfully from his vantage point above the human beings that had been reduced to skeletons of pigeon scavengers. Crossing his well-defined arms across his chest he turned his head to gauge the reaction of the stout bespectacled man standing to his left. The man nodded his round head in assent. His nametag pronounced in bold letters "DR. STRYKER".  
  
"Should we go check on the new subjects?" The man, Stryker, asked him, already turning to leave.  
  
"You think they lived?" Not a hint of compassion in his voice. A short, hoarse laugh grated through his lips and quickly fell in tune with their thudding boots as the two men walked down the wooden stairs out of the watchtower.  
  
"'Make for an interesting report," Stryker replied hubrusly, tilting his head back so the light made a shadow of his short, thick facial hair.  
  
When they reached the bunker across the yard they were met with the distraught face of a camp nurse. They listened concernedly as he explained the details of the patients' rather gruesome deaths and after a few minutes they began to smell the rank odor the nurse told them had been coming from the posthumous bodies. With nods of polite condolences they dismissed the nurse's explanation and followed him inside the dim bunker. The two men, camp doctors or scientists as they liked to call themselves, were unaffected by the sight before them. It was more of a morbid fascination they felt.  
  
Meanwhile, the nurse was having an increasingly hard time suppressing his gag reflex and finally he cried, "Why the hell don't we just use animals?!" He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of disgust, but when the doctors turned to stare at him he self-consciously lowered them and pointedly wiped them on his apron front.  
  
"My dear, Thomas," he said in a mockingly tender tone, "Humans are animals. We are just the best of them. And we will only work with the best - for the best," he added quickly, "because this really is for the people, to better their lives." He smiled enigmatically, softening the hard lines of his handsome, square face. The nurse didn't look assuaged, only more nauseous.  
  
Later, the two men discussed the failure of their patients but the overall success of their research. They had reached a point where they thought they could make people, in a way, immune to physical pain. Since their birth they had been told and experienced that "life is pain". They saw daily affirmations in the despondent camp inmates they presided over. To remedy that, they would artificially stop the pain from ever reaching the nervous system, or have the wound healed practically upon infliction. The people would soon see that they really were working for them.  
  
The only problem was, they weren't concerned with the costs. Even if it took its toll on them. Sacrifices were made for the greater good. Pure Machiavellian dogma four hundred years later. What the men didn't realize was that these people they were sacrificing for their greater good had already involuntarily been deprived of their entire lives. It would take a mishap of the most scarring sort to help one of these men understand. The other would continue his insolent ways, even at the cost of his own son, and eventually life.  
  
Increasingly, as the weeks passed, he spent more time standing naked, flexing and turning in front of his full-length mirror - admiring what he'd accomplished physically and simultaneously wanting to know what it would be like to be superhuman. He yearned for greater physical prowess at a primitively guttural level.  
  
The next time he and Stryker spoke of the possibility of such experiments, when he voiced his willingness to be a central participant, he watched as the other man's dark eyes glinted with flashes of alternating possibility and greed. It made him a guinea pig, really. But in his mind what they were doing was far larger than the standard of any domestic rodent.  
  
He listened with rapt attention as every day Stryker talked animatedly about their plans for him. His ego inflated until it had no choice but to be popped. This inevitable deflation occurred instantaneously upon his premature awakening from insufficient sedation.  
  
Lunging forward, his claws planted themselves in the moist ground where the snow had apparently melted and sent a screaming pains up his arms as he woke with a gasp. The combination of his retrospective dreams and the sight of the hideous monstrosity he had made of himself was all at once more forceful than any of his recent physical pains. He suddenly began sobbing uncontrollably in noisy, massive heaves of his chest. He wanted to rake his flesh open with his own knives that were now a part of him. But he could not because of his own self-preservation instincts (it was instinct, after all, that was keeping him alive) and the great effort it would have taken to move his weapons from their encasement of soft earth. So he rocked and twisted with bestial weeping, allowing fragments of barbaric, heaving screams to escape his torturously curled lips. As much as his pain was uncontrollable, he feared, above all else, being discovered.  
  
When his breath came out in short pants that were quieter than his crying gasps yet still grating over the sandpaper interior of his throat and mouth, he dragged himself to his feet. Unaware of what he had ended or started, he staggered on with blind despondency that mirrored the desolate landscape of barren winter - resigned to the life of isolation he now possessed. 


End file.
